| Director(s) | Denis Villeneuve |
| Principal Cast | Karine Vanasse as Valérie Sébastien Huberdeau as Jean-François Maxim Gaudette as The Killer |
| Release Date | 2009 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 77 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
Note: This review contains spoilers regarding the first 30 minutes of the film as opposed to the site’s usual benchmark of 10-20 minutes. The same effort towards sustaining the intrigue and momentum of the film is maintained in this review, and all plot details revealed are just meant to be a springboard to discuss the scope of the work in better detail. Nothing discussed should undermine the “best” portions of the film or the many mysteries that keep the story engaging.
Two women operate a photocopier as a sea of students bustle and jovially engage around them. Within a minute, this peace is interrupted by a set of gunshots. One of the women falls down in pain while the other clutches her ear; violence has created a division and the two women are now framed separately.
The camera tilts from the woman holding her ear to the one wounded on the floor before cutting again to the former. The cut reinforces the disruption that’s occurred – the space has become split. Accordingly, the sound also complete cuts out to a deafening silence as the subject of the shot, both literal and filmic, stumbles to find a grounding. The title card drops in, and a message appears indicating that the story to follow is based off survivor testimony from the Polytechnique shooting of 1989 but chronicles a series of fictional characters.
We cut back chronologically and open on the shooter pointing the barrel of his gun to his head; he’s in the throes of suicidal ideation but chooses to not go forward with his decision yet. Instead, he lingers in his dirty, unkept apartment, unable to maintain his gaze on anything in particular. He opens a fridge as if looking for food but his eyes are focused on nothing in particular – there’s something missing.
But his roommate pays no heed to this odd behavior and the two exchange an informal “goodbye” with one another before the camera slowly pushes in on the killer’s face in a close-up shot, reinforcing the isolation of its subject. Even while eating his breakfast, the killer simply goes through the motions and looks somewhere off to the distance.
But when he sees his neighbor’s apartment lights up from his window, he suddenly becomes very focused. He turns off the light in the dining room and stares across; a close-up highlights his focused, intent gaze. The score changes as a result and an ominous droning and somber piano begin to play.
His neighbor begins to move and the killer runs to another room in his place and continues to stare; his neighbor, a young woman, is his obsessive focus. She turns off the lights to her place and departs the location. The killer turns away from his window dejectedly and then begins to act.
He starts to clean his dirty flat before writing a letter and delivering its contents to us via a voice-over monologue; this is his “declaration” and explanation for the shooting he is to commit, a shooting we have already borne witness to. From its outset, director Denis Villenevue explicitly challenges this justification by placing it after the shooting itself; the shock of the violence makes the killer’s abhorrent reasoning untenable from its inception.
Yet, the deconstruction of the motivation doesn’t stop there. The killer exalts himself as a person of reason who believes in science and explains that this position has led him to want to eliminate all “feminists”, a position he attributes to women by virtue of existence. He claims that they usurp all benefits of men without having to do any of the same labor and that he’s tired of it; yet, he also admits that he, a natural genius who gets great marks without trying, does not wish to do any meaningful study, labor, and be subject to a government. The points are non-sequitur and do not make sense when given more than a moment’s thought; instead, the rant reveals that he’s unable to comprehend himself outside of his hatred.
His alienation must be caused by some other agent(s): women. As the voice-over continues, he stares at a mirror and sees himself alone in the reflection; but if he refuses to understand himself, then his reflection offers no solace. This distance from identity is reinforced when he goes to burn any photographs of himself underneath the mirror in the sink. His sense of self exists only in opposition to the women he has decried as enemy and has nothing to furnish itself on.
The film cuts to another apartment and the non-diegetic track finally stops playing. A young woman, Stéphanie (Evelyne Brochu), holds a cigarette outside the window. She brings it back in and takes a puff before calling out to her roomate, Valérie (Karine Vanasse), to ask a science question related to entropy. Valérie explains the answer and then gets for an interview.
She tries on a series of dresses while looking in the mirror and isn’t satisfied with how she looks. Thankfully, Stéphanie notices her struggling and helps out with getting a better outfit as a diegetic song plays; the two friends smile with each other as they look into the mirror while the music continues and livens up the moment.
Thus, the difference between the men and women’s apartments are formally rendered by Villenevue. One has closed windows while the other apartment’s is open. One has persons who are closed off to one another while the other has persons who eagerly assist and communicate with one another. One is silent and filled with a music that its subjects cannot hear while the other is filled with the sounds of a cheerful song that its subjects can enjoy. While the men are alienated and separate, the women are together and engage in community. This is why Valérie, as opposed to the killer, can find her identity vis-a-vis the mirror; she has a friend to help her out.
While the two young women make their way to university, the film cuts back to the killer who looks at people while driving; his car’s windows and side-view mirrors frame persons in unnatural manners and showcase the killer’s warped perspective. The non-diegetic track comes back into play as he writes and delivers an apology letter to his mother, a woman who he feels a need to explain things to – a sharp contradiction given his complete admonishment of all womenkind.
As the music continues to play, the film cuts to a slanted view of a library, before slowly arcing as it tracks to a new subject, Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau). When the young man enters the frame in the up-right position, the non-diegetic track disappears. A passerby calls out to Jean-Francois (JF) and greets him before departing – JF, unlike the killer, is not isolated and has connections.
Meanwhile, Valérie proceeds to her interview and tries to make a case for herself. But the interviewer immediately disrupts her when he questions her choice to pursue mechanical over civil engineering; the latter, he suggests, is more popular for women because it’s easier and allows them to raise a family. The misogynistic implication of his words is clear: Valérie obviously cannot handle the rigors of the harder discipline if she has “motherly” aspirations. The camera closes in on her face as she struggles to answer the question; the sexism has isolated her in the conversation. Far from finding it easier to get a job as per the killer’s proclamations, she’s immediately forced to jump through additional hoops that her male counterparts would never have to deal with.
She goes to the bathroom to deal with her frustrations and finds herself surrounded by a series of reflections, a sea of Valéries caught up in the fracture opened by the interviewer’s intrusion. But the camera pans through these series of reflections until it comes onto a frame of close-up of a singular reflection of Valérie; she’s found herself once again and proceeds forward. Unlike the killer who refuses to look inwards and seeks external scapegoats for his issues, she looks inwards and finds something to affirm.
We cut to a cafeteria where a host of students converse among themselves and engage in everyday behavior. The killer makes his way through the crowd as if looking for something but ends up even more isolated amongst the crowd. He’s unable to find any connection and goes to his car as a non-diegetic score briefly comes into play again.
But it quickly dissipates as Stéphanie comes into the frame; she’s looking for Valérie to get the details on the interview and comforts her friend over the less-than-pleasant encounter. Valérie reveals that she got the job because she played the part expected by the interviewer and claimed she wasn’t interested in having kids; she was forced to repress her desire to get a “fair” chance”
The conversation dissipates and up-beat diegetic music starts to play as the camera goes through the students gathered in the cafeteria to find JF sitting in frustration; he’s incapable of figuring out a problem and spots Valérie and Stéphanie amongst everyone. He immediately goes to greet them and asks for help solving the problem. Valérie lends him his notes and he goes to copy them. Once again, Valérie comes to the aid of a friend, male instead of female this time around. The killer’s speech is once again emphatically disproved as the most knowledgeable person, the one willing to help both women and men, is a woman.
Furthermore, in sharp contrast to the killer, JF is more than amenable to women and accepts their help and friendship just as willingly as he would any man. While scanning, he exchanges kind words with another woman looking to use the photocopier and quickly takes his notes. But his gaze gets caught up in a painting.
The non-diegetic score creeps back in while the camera slowly pushes in on a copy of Picasso’s “Guernica”; the piece of art uses “lack of color to express the starkness of the aftermath of the bombing”. It serves as an “anti-war symbol” and an “embodiment of peace”. It offers multiple interpretations of its elements. [1] Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso. 10 Facts About Guernica by Pablo Picasso. (n.d.). Retrieved February 5, 2023, from https://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp
The intensified focus on the painting thus serves a dual purpose: it foreshadows of the violence to come, a violence we’ve already been privy to due to the non-linear telling of the narrative, and aligns the films motivations and some of its structural choices with the paintings. We’ve seen the black-and-white aesthetic on display and the violence proper and, thus, we brace ourselves for the “aftermath” and the “peace” to follow.
This image of violence cuts to the killer’s hands clenched in prayer and his deep breaths merge with the score. He’s getting ready to (re)enact the shooting and looks to steady himself. He scribbles more into his letter, as if anything he has left to say can explain what he’s going to do. Then he hears a group of students talking outside and a women’s voice breaks through his trance. He is ready.
He walks back into the school and the camera captures him in a blurry haze reflecting his ill-defined subjectivity. A close-up on his face captures his absolute inability to come to terms with himself in the world. He looks around the space but only sees men around him; his choice of victim does not seem available. But then, like JF, he catches sight of Valérie and Stéphanie heading to class; his choice is set and his victims, women, have been found.
The film continues to swap between these three primary perspectives – the killer, JF, Valérie – before, during, and after the events of the shooting in an attempt to demonstrate the fracturing effect of violence and the way it (re)forms bonds between both individuals and their surroundings. By showing us the violence at the beginning, the film primes us to focus not on the violence itself but on the manner by which it moves through a system and changes it.
In this way, the violence comes to be a formal marker that disrupts the film as much as it disrupts the characters’ lives. The scene of the shooting repeatedly intervenes, demonstrating its violent, traumatic effects on the psyche. The characters who survive are unable to ever fully forget this disruption as it keeps rearing its ugly head. This effect is felt by the viewer as well who is unable to ever enjoy the time with the characters knowing what’s to come; even a peaceful moment after the shooting becomes interrupted as the film threatens to cut to darker times and force us to relive the trauma again.
This editing approach transforms the shooting from a singular event to a site of traumatic commingling as the perspectives of the characters with their respective chronologies bleed into one another in oneiric fashion. A scene goes from being a flashback to being a dream based on whose subjectivity is being recognized; violence fractures individuals and splinters their experience before reforming them in a new image. The interpretatively ambiguous “Guernica” becomes a fitting double to the film as violence shatters the otherwise normal and forces us to question.
This is why the killer is introduced after the effects of his shooting, leaving him as only a symbolic placeholder as an agent of violence; even the credits list him as merely “The Killer.” Both JF and Valérie are introduced after a scene of the killer going through his plans for the day; the former parties are unaware of his presence but his actions will come to severely impact their lives and after they are made to experience the violence, just as the viewer does at the film’s start, time goes out of joint. The film circles this point of senseless brutality and forces us to engage.
But Villeneuve isn’t as interested in the violence by itself as he is in examining its relation to the sexes and the way those demarcations manifest in identity. This is why he jumps between two men – the killer and JF – and a woman – Valérie. The killer can only see women as the cause of his alienation while JF sees them as companions no different from himself. The film repeatedly highlights how the former’s alienation leaves him fully closed off from men and women despite his stated intentions while the latter’s openness leaves him able to freely interact with everyone. Windows being opened versus closed, diegetic versus non-diegetic music, and camera flips help to signify the difference in these spaces, while mirrors help to make sense of how subjects find themselves in relation these spaces. These attributes help visualize violence’s effects as the changes in spaces render women as fungible objects that can be sacrificed and make distinguishing between “good” and “bad” men much more difficult. The set-up allows Villenevue to suggest that the solution to this heinousness lies in communication, he ultimately leaves the final answer up to interpretation.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | Polytechnique formally breakdowns a school-shooting from a series of gendered perspectives, including that of the male killer’s, in a non-chronological format in order to examine the way violence fractures subjectivity. Its editing takes advantage of being able to shift between these multi-faceted approaches and is able to oscillate in oneiric fashion that captivates as much as it perplexes. |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Grade | A+ |
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
